Employment in SMEs as a Result of Effective Knowledge Transfer

by Lars Bergman

An interesting example showing a way to addressing unemployment
and strengthening SMEs is given by the IT-link company in Gothenburg on
the West Coast of Sweden. ITLink is a joint venture for technology transfer
set up by three Swedish IT-oriented institutes and Chalmers. The example
is the 'IT in Small Companies' project which has been passing one full
implementation and is now in a second phase applying some of the lessons
learned in the first stage. The effectiveness is proven by the outcome
of 67% of the unemployed persons has gone to employment at the end of
the project in the first phase and the prognosis for the second phase is
80-100% employment at the end.

The project which is now in a second round was set up to gather 20 unemployed
persons with some academic background. The first round covered 30 persons.
The selected persons were given a competence base by the means of an education
for three months and then a training program for nine months. As part of
the training the persons were matched with SMEs and company based IT-projects
were formed, one in each company and with one of the trainees as the resource.
The trainee was coached by persons in the ITLink company. Several successful
projects were accomplished and have had an continuation within the SME
company after the project period.

The project is funded from several sources, government employment agency,
local government SME support, EU Commission etc. Competence from the Institutes
was used in the education program as well as for coaching. Thus the ITLink
company has proven itself to work as an effective technology transfer link
between the SMEs and Institutes.

The projects were formulated and set up in close discussion between
the SME, the ITLink company and the trainee concerned. The duration of
such a local project was six months:

DIAL is a prototype for an interactive classroom merging pedagogy and
modern IT

PITA has given the SME a common network including modems and printers
and enables faxing and emailing from individual workstations as well as
access to Internet, external databases and internal sales statistics.

Lessons learned

In the first round of the project there were some problems found for
instance concerning the fit between the trainee, the SME and the local
project.

So a thorough screening process was set up including an external recruitment
consultant making personal depth interviews with the applying persons to
ensure the maximum aptitude, attitude and competence match for the persons
to be selected to the new round. The education and training part of the
round is basically the same as in the first one. The outcome seems to have
been significantly improved in this round both in terms of local project
success and in terms of trainees getting employment at the end of the project.

Business Intelligence for SMEs

A new project UFO is aiming at building capability for Business Intelligence
within SMEs is in the starting phase. The idea is to increase SME competitiveness
by using IT in an intelligent way. Most SMEs today lack the capability
for this whereas the opportunity today is good for setting the SME on an
'equal' footing to bigger companies. Opportunities increased dramatically
by the rise of IT-resources like the WWW.

ITLink - a Joint Venture for IT-Institutes

The objective of this activity is the transfer of technology and know-how
to industry. Projects that encourage the use of Information Technology
in small and medium-sized companies in Sweden will be set up and supported.
The results of research work in applied information technology achieved
by IT-Link's academic partners ­ the research institutes IMT (Institute
of Media Technology), SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science), and
SISU (Swedish Institute of System Development) and Chalmers University
of Technology (Dept. of Computer Science) ­ will be transferred to
and experimented by the industrial community.